


flotsam and jetsam

by Eddaic



Category: Gintama
Genre: Angst, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, PTSD, Post Joui War, mature themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-21
Updated: 2017-02-21
Packaged: 2018-09-24 01:00:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9692645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eddaic/pseuds/Eddaic
Summary: “Stop trying so hard,” he murmurs.





	

**flotsam and jetsam**

“I can’t stand this.”

Gintoki stops digging around in his ear with his pinky and glances at Zura, who is uncharacteristically slouched over, his chin in his manicured hand. That plum nail polish should make him look like a mutinous teenager, but somehow gives him the appearance of a (possibly spoilt) lady of polite society. Gintoki doesn't bother to try to find any sense in it; he's long since accepted Zura's existence as an anomaly.

“What?” says Gintoki, playing with a gob of wax before wiping it on the Rexine couch. “That stuffy kimono? All the useless dry ice? Saigou’s face?”

A little furrow appears in Zura’s brow. He is silent for a while before he replies dully, “All this. Everything.”

At first Gintoki is unable to process that tone, because he never thought he’d hear it again. The last time Zura used it, he was –

“You’re gonna have to be more specific than that,” Gintoki forces himself to say, swigging his sake. He doesn’t want to think about the war, not now, not ever. It’s behind him, its memory chained away in a far corner of his mind, and he’s not going to bring it out for anything. Shit, he wishes he hadn’t promised Teru to visit the bar on a Friday night, when he  _should_  have been doing the exciting things virile young men do, like reading Jump while scarfing down strawberry pudding.

Zura bites his lip and looks away. He sits with his knees well apart, like he usually takes care not to do, because it’s rude and unbecoming of samurai. At length he makes a small sound at the back of his throat, something probably meant to signify an ‘excuse me’, and gets up, swaying like he’s had too much sake. Maybe he  _has_  had too much sake. Gintoki wouldn’t know; he only got here a short while ago.

“…Zura?” He hates the worry in his voice. He hates how he tries  _so hard_  to  _not_  worry about Zura, but Zura is just someone he ends up worrying about, anyway. Of all the arbitrary reunions he’s had, the one with Zura has been the most unpleasant. The morbid fool grasps at straws for a cause that was burnt to cinders a decade ago. He thinks he’s fighting men when he’s only cutting at shadows, and it hurts to look at him. It’s so much easier to pretend Zura is fine, just fine, Gintoki, Elizabeth caught a cold and there’s a new video game out and you shouldn’t eat so many sweets, Gintoki, it’s bad for your health do you need any help withLeaderandShinpachi –

Zura glances at him, and there's no cry for help in his eyes – there's nothing at all. A tremor passes through Gintoki, as if the gelid winds of Hakodate beach are pushing against his chest again, whistling past his ears. In such moments the quagmire of his thoughts is difficult to wade out of.

“You need to _tell me_  what’s wrong, you cryptic bastard,” he says, more hoarsely than he intended.

Zura ignores him and begins to trundle away, tripping a little in his geta. Gintoki leaps to his feet, cursing, and grabs Zura’s wrist.

“Let go,” is Zura’s quiet, tired mumble.

“No.”

“You’re hurting me.” He makes a half-hearted attempt to pull away.

Gintoki doesn’t loosen his grip. “I’m taking you home.”

“I can go myself – "

“To the Yorozuya.”

He all but drags Zura, who argues weakly but doesn't put up a fight, to his flat. Kagura and Shinpachi are both at the Shimura household and won’t be back till the next afternoon. Gintoki pushes Zura onto the couch, orders him to stay put, and rushes downstairs, taking two at a time, to pester the old bat for makeup remover. She’s perched on a stool, about to fire up a cigarette, and already beginning to look rankled at the din of the bar.

“What do you need makeup remover for?” she asks, raising a knowing eyebrow.

“I saw him bring a woman up to the Yorozuya!” Catherine crows, brandishing a finger at him. “She was real fine! I have no idea how Sakata managed to get her. Did you pay her? Is she a prostitute? She must’ve charged you extra because you’re so ugly – ”

Gintoki decides it will be easier not to tell them that the woman is actually his friend in drag. “She wants it. I don’t know why,” he says blandly.

When he returns to his living room, Zura is in the same position he was ten minutes ago, his hands folded on his lap, his expression blank. Gintoki gets some old cotton balls from the bathroom cabinet, sits on the coffee table in front of Zura, and gently begins to mop his face. He has to hold onto Zura’s chin so his head won’t move around too much. Beneath the caked makeup Zura’s skin is pallid. Grey circles sag beneath his eyes. Gintoki begins to wipe his mouth, and Zura suddenly looks up at him, and he feels like he’s  _silencing_  Zura even though he’s not, so he removes his hand. There’s dark red smudged over Zura’s cheek, a dab of oil paint.

Heat coils in Gintoki's belly and he averts his gaze, ashamed. “Chamomile tea?” is all he manages to say. Shinpachi always keeps a jar of it in the kitchen, though no one drinks it but him.

Zura pries the cotton ball from Gintoki’s clammy fingers and brings it to his lips, finishing the job. He doesn’t say yes to the tea but Gintoki makes some anyway, because he’s jittery like he’s had too much caffeine and needs to do something with his hands to distract himself.

He puts the tea on the table and collapses next to Zura. They don’t look at each other. Gintoki is already aware, in an abstract way, of what’s wrong – of all his friends, Zura is the one he knows best – but he doesn’t want to  _go_  there. It would bring back to mind heads held high as trophies (and warnings) and crow feathers choking the earth. He wants to help, wants Zura to  _forget_  all this. He wants to never remember Shouyou. He wants…he…

“Stop trying so hard,” he murmurs. 

Zura absently picks at a stain on the lap of his violet, floral-print kimono. He hasn’t touched the tea, but when Gintoki glances at him his eyes are not so hollow anymore. At length he swallows and whispers, “I feel like there are so many of me I could die.”

A part of Gintoki wants to make fun of him, on reflex, because this is Zura, and it would be familiar and comforting. Another is painfully,  _painfully_  aware of what Zura means.

“I wake up on some days,” Zura continues, appearing dazed, slurring his words, “and feel like I’m in a dream. The bar, the Jouishishi, the Shinsengumi are just illusions. Reality is behind me, in childhood, even during the war, and I can’t go back to it. Sometimes I feel being on the battlefield was preferable to this.”

Gintoki is vacillating between encouraging him to keep talking and shouting at him to shut up.

“And I…don’t know which is the real me, or if there _is_ a real me at all. I find myself dressed in a woman’s kimono and think, ‘Why am I doing this?’ I’m eating soba with Elizabeth and wonder, ‘When did this thing get here?’ I'm not really making sense, am I? I…” He trails off, his voice thick. Finally he bows his head. “I’m sorry, I’m upsetting you.”

He gets up on shaking legs. Gintoki pulls him back down by his sleeve. It’s an unspoken request: stay.

After a few moments a cool hand covers his own. Without thinking, he twines their fingers together, like when they were boys and he was leading Zura to a gnarly willow he found, or when they were soldiers and he was tugging him to the back of a dilapidated temple. He’d pinned him to a crumbling wall and it had seemed to take too long to undo their armour.

He doesn’t know how long they sit together, their shoulders brushing.

Zura shifts and clears his throat, says softly, “I should leave.”

Neither of them move. Gintoki’s tired too. He’s so,  _so_  fucking tired. He doesn’t want to look at Zura and feel nothing but festering pain. He wants them to bicker over who gets the biggest pork bun, and disagree on which cloud looks like what animal, and watch melodramatic rom-coms only to snipe about them later. He says, “Let’s get some food.”

“I don’t want to go out.” Zura still sounds exhausted, but some warmth has bled back into his voice.

“We can eat in.”

They order in noodles and eat straight from the greasy brown boxes. Some colour returns to Zura’s cheeks, and Gintoki turns on the TV. They sit on the floor, their backs against the sofa, leaning against each other. Gintoki knows neither of them are really paying attention to the talk show; they're just going through the motions, easing themselves into some semblance of normality. 

When Zura rests his head in the crook of Gintoki’s neck, Gintoki turns and noses his hair. As a child he would gather it up and brush it over his face, pretend he had a beard or a moustache. He presses his lips to it.

Later, after they’ve both washed, he rolls out an extra futon in his bedroom while Zura steals from the closet - a pair of track pants and a baggy t-shirt that was probably black but is now a murky grey. In the dark their eyes meet, just briefly, and without a word Zura shuffles over onto Gintoki’s futon. He’s warm, and smells a bit like Gintoki’s clothes - cheap detergent and strawberry soap. Gintoki wraps his arms around him and peppers his face with kisses. Zura takes his cheeks in his callused hands and kisses him back, slowly.

They break apart, and Gintoki brushes his thumb over Zura's collarbone. He tries not to fret over how brittle it feels. Zura had always been underweight, as if the poverty of his childhood had made a home in his body. During one of his leaner months (early on, when wigs weren’t part of Gintoki’s daily annoyances), Takasugi had mentioned to Gintoki how Zura couldn’t be a samurai if he was as light as a pine cone. Gintoki had replied, picking his nose, that Shouyou was running a school, not a soup kitchen. Later that night he caught Takasugi handing over his dumplings to Zura, muttering something gruffly about not being hungry.

"Still feel like reality's behind you?" Gintoki murmurs.

Zura says nothing. He takes Gintoki's fingers and plays with them guiltily.

Gintoki scoots closer still, and their breaths mingle. It's as if they are back in the terakoya, huddling together under a tattered comforter during a thunderstorm. (One such time, Zura had said something like, _I wonder if thunderstorms were created so people could cuddle each other_ , and Gintoki had scowled and called him an idiot, but then asked Shouyou the same question the next morning.) "Hey, Zura," he whispers with the smirk of a conspirator.

"It's not Zura, it's Katsura. What is it?"

"I'll call you that even when we're senile old geezers."

"...Was that a proposal of sorts?"

"Call it what you will."

Zura purses his lips, his gaze open and raw. Then he closes his eyes and nuzzles Gintoki's cheek. Gintoki runs his hand heavily over Zura’s waist, his hip, feeling the muscles shift beneath the worn fabric. 

"Zura."

" _What_?"

"Your nose is cold."

Zura yanks vengefully at Gintoki's hair, and they both laugh, and Gintoki lifts himself to lie on top of him and plant kisses on his mouth. They're giggling like a pair of children skipping class and creeping out of school. Gintoki can feel the curve of Zura's smile beneath his. He remembers the boy who lurked at the gates of the terakoya, thinking that Gintoki couldn't see him.

“Bet you can stand this, huh?”

“Shut it, perm-head.”

_-finis-_

**Author's Note:**

> Zura's line about there being 'so many of him' is taken from 'The Cultural Revolution Inside My Dream' by Kim Hyesoon, though it doesn't fit the original meaning.


End file.
